War rages between competing factions within the hacker collective Anonymous after this weekend's drama-filled takeover of the main Anonymous IRC server network. That network, used by Anons to plan and conduct attacks, was taken over by one of its own, an IRC moderator known as "Ryan."

His attack has sparked a debate over the "leadership" of Anonymous.
QUOTEThe main Internet chat servers used by Anonymous have been run by a group called "AnonOps," which provides communications platforms for the group. Pointing IRC clients at anonops.ru or anonops.net would connect anyone to the servers, where they could then join channels like "#OpSony" and participate in various Anon activities.

Though Anonymous is often described as leaderless, factions like AnonOps by necessity have a loose structure; servers must be paid for, domain names must be registered, chat channels must have at least some moderation. Ryan was one of those IRC mods, and this weekend he proceeded with an attack that seized control of the AnonOps servers away from the small cabal of leaders who ran it.

Those leaders include people with handles like "shitstorm," "Nerdo," "blergh," "Power2All," and "Owen"—and if you're paying attention, you'll remember that HBGary Federal's Aaron Barr had fingered Owen as one of three "leaders" of all Anons.

The most popular channel on the old IRC servers now says simply, "anonops dead go home." Ryan also put up a set of chat logs showing Owen and others reacting to the weekend's massive denial of service attacks against AnonOps that culminated in the server takeover. (In the transcript below, "doom" is one of the AnonOps servers.)